A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle’s imaginative children’s sci-fi novel A Wrinkle in Time (1962) gets the big-screen, big-budget, CGI-heavy, all-star-cast treatment in this Disney adaptation directed by Ava DuVernay. The story revolves around bright, scientifically gifted thirteen year-old Meg Murry, the daughter of two world-renowned physicists, who struggles with issues of self-worth, especially after the mysterious disappearance of her father. Meg, her equally brilliant little brother Charles Wallace, and her school crush Calvin, are visited by three celestial guides who transport the young trio to worlds beyond their imagination by wrinkling time and space (or tessering). These three heavenly mommas (played by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling) encourage Meg to embrace her personal flaws and find the strength to defeat a powerful evil known as the IT.

This film is an across-the-board failure, unless you give it points for good intentions. I’m sure that many young kids and their parents will respond positively to L'Engle’s self-empowerment themes, regardless of DuVernay’s spoon-fed-to-the-point-of-choking delivery. But if there was ever a case of overwhelming a simple, enchanting little narrative with a bloated Hollywood production, this is it. Almost nothing in the movie feels alive. Cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler photographs this film like TV viewed through a magnifying glass. Film editor Spencer Averick pieces the oddly framed close-ups and colorful screensaver vistas together with all the grace of a drunk darts player. The episodic screenplay (co-penned by Jennifer Lee, the talented writer of Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen) lumbers along from set piece to set piece, from one earnest monologue to another, pausing only for lengthy expository speeches that make Virginia Madsen’s opening narration in David Lynch’s Dune (1984) seem brief and comprehensible. 

Most egregious of all, with one notable exception, the cast delivers Phantom-Menace-level awful performances. This fatal defect is the most surprising, given that DuVernay’s previous pictures, the excellent low-budget independent dramas I Will Follow (2010), Middle of Nowhere (2012), and Selma (2014), all feature outstanding performances. And A Wrinkle in Time’s fantasy environments were not created in isolated studios where Winfrey, Witherspoon, and Kaling delivered their lines separately against green screens. You would never know it, but they were apparently all together on the side of some mountain in New Zealand when they shot their otherworldly sequences.  The three stars are awkward and stiff with no sense of magic or mystery. They seem to be playing states of being rather than actual beings—Winfrey as regal, Witherspoon as kooky, and Kaling as… inanimate?

Equally at sea are the actors playing Meg’s parents, Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (two stalwart stars who, until now, have elevated every picture they’ve appeared in.) None of the actors feel connected to each other. Meg’s mother doesn’t even leave Earth in this story, yet Mbatha-Raw’s performance always feels like she’s been asked to stare at an off-camera tennis ball and emote to it. The film’s one saving grace is the lead performance of fourteen year-old Storm Reid. Though surrounded by a supporting cast that can give her no support, Reid is credible and grounded as Meg. While she alone cannot hold this preposterous concoction together, she creates a relatable and sympathetic character with her confident but unselfconscious performance. 

I made the mistake of seeing what I thought would be a grand cinematic spectacle on a giant IMAX screen—silly me, this movie was made to be watched on iPads in short bursts during car rides. But I doubt this over-produced disaster will have the shelf life Disney expects. Nor will it achieve the lofty goals it sets out to accomplish. But it does succeed in instilling deep appreciation for the simplicity of the printed word—I’m guessing more kids will now discover L’Engle’s proto-Young-Adult classic and be won over by the power of her writing. The book should have no trouble enabling readers to replace the disposable bedazzled images of this movie with their own distinctive visual conceptions of the story.